


the middle of the world

by juldevere



Category: NCIS
Genre: Angst, F/M, but the ending is kinda nice?!, starts off real sad, stays real sad
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-23
Updated: 2019-04-23
Packaged: 2020-01-24 12:14:42
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 7,183
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18571273
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/juldevere/pseuds/juldevere
Summary: Dear Ziva,We could’ve had a life together. I wanted a life with you. I should’ve told you earlier, I should’ve stopped and looked at you and told you, but I was scared, and you were scared, and we weren’t ready. I’m ready now. I’m ready right now. I’m still scared but not being with you is scarier.  I can’t wait but I will. I’ll wait and wait and wait for you, holding my breath, trying to breathe at all.I can’t breathe, Ziva.We could’ve had a life together.Tony.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> I started this thing way back in 2015 but stopped because it was dragging me down and making me way too sad but Ziva is officially alive, baby! So we’re back in business…or something to that effect.
> 
> Couple things: this is mostly from Tony’s perspective and your mileage may vary on liking that, so I figured I’d let you know right at the top. Also, the narrative follows shortly after Past, Present and Future but doesn’t stay 100% within the canon of the show.
> 
> Title comes from the track ‘The Middle of the World’ on the Moonlight score by Nicholas Brittell.
> 
> Enjoy!

A week later he’s unfolding the list, deserted and forgotten about, from the back pocket of that pair of jeans that had been sitting in a pile of unwashed clothes in his laundry room. Realizing that he had no other clean pants left, he had grabbed them without making the connection but there’s now a sharp slice unfurling its way across his chest. He balls the paper in his fist like it’ll go away if he scrunches tight enough, nails digging harder and harder into his skin.

The construction of it had stopped just as it had started; I will, I will, I will, he had written at the very top, pen poised and ready. But it felt futile and pointless to go any further because anything he thought impertinent enough to include on a list of aspirations and dreams all had to do with the dream he left on the tarmac. 

He writes her letters instead. Messy and sad and lonely letters. He writes them to her even though he has no concrete address, had no intention of sealing them, but he keeps writing anyway because he has to do something, the ache at the back of his throat is an infection, throbbing and throbbing; he has to do something.

 

_Dear Ziva,_

_We could’ve had a life together. I wanted a life with you. I should’ve told you earlier, I should’ve stopped and looked at you and told you, but I was scared, and you were scared, and we weren’t ready. I’m ready now. I’m ready right now. I’m still scared but not being with you is scarier.  I can’t wait but I will. I’ll wait and wait and wait for you, holding my breath, trying to breathe at all._

_I can’t breathe, Ziva._

_We could’ve had a life together._

_Tony._

 

The letters begin to pile up until there are so many of them, he’s forced to find a box, storing it beneath his bed, keeping the letters in the dark. It doesn’t help, it doesn’t make much of a difference, but it puts her on a concrete part of the world, in his world, in this world, she was real and concrete and all his.

Except the reality was that she wasn’t. Not even remotely. She never was nor would be.

_We could’ve had a life together._

*

Two months pass.

He still needs to methodically swallow over the lump that comes to his throat whenever he opens his desk drawer and finds it there, the gold glistening in a way that isn’t threatening but disarming: she existed, it tells him, she was real, she was here, this happened. It’s why he keeps it there, it’s why he can’t bring himself to move it even when his throat closes up, and he must mentally plead with himself not to cry sitting at his desk in the middle of a Tuesday morning.

He can’t believe how sad he is, still. It’s abhorrent. It’s like a liquid in his bones that won’t drain; it just sits there, and he is filled with it, this sadness. When he’s making case notes, when he tries to sleep, when he tries to grin back at the blonde woman at the other end of the bar. He’s so thick and heavy with this sad dread that won’t leave him, no matter how much he works at ignoring that it’s there, but it’s no use. He’s just so sad he’s compressed by it.

He drinks a beer over the sink at half past five one morning when he can’t sleep, and writing isn’t helping. He thinks of her every day in a way that’s hazy, almost detached but in the mornings, he’s ever so increasingly thin and vulnerable to it, to her memory. He can imagine her standing there just behind him, her fingers scratching their way down the back of his neck, can hear the tempo of her humming, and it matters because he misses her so much and this couldn’t possibly get any worse, it couldn’t.

It could he suddenly wants to scream, wants to just, scream at her - it could get worse, it is worse - every day without you; _are you okay, are you suffering, are you still destroying yourself_. Not knowing is worse.

He bites down on his tongue but it’s no use, he’s now silently weeping. He spills the rest of his drink down the drain, bringing his face into both hands. Wishing it were that easy, wishing he could drain her from his brain and pull her like shards from his skin, but he can’t, and this isn’t easy.

*

For her birthday he buys a card and presses a flower to stick into it, writes her name at the top with ink that stains his fingertips.

 

_Ziva,_

_Happy Birthday. You’re probably wiser, I definitely know you’re older. Ha! Just kidding._

_I can’t figure out what to say next, I feel like I’ve forgotten how to talk to you. You remember in An Affair to Remember? It all turned out okay in the end, even with their pride and their hearts and their fear. I miss you. I’ve stopped wondering when it will go away because I’ve accepted that it won’t, and you should know that I do and that I will for the rest of my life. I hope you’re okay. Please be okay._

_I love you, Ziva._

_Tony._

 

He sends it to Shmeil, who had reached out to him not long after it had happened. Shmeil’s only contact with Ziva, it turns out, was through the form of nondescript postcards she sent to him months and months apart with no return address. Shmeil promises to give it to her though, somehow, and Tony emails his thanks and his appreciation even though he knows it’s doubtful.

It makes him feel better though, somehow, for the first time. It makes him feel a little lighter.

He’s accepted this fate, his longing for her: _for the rest of my life, I will miss you_ and feels better.

*

He’s eating breakfast in his car because it had been a long night and it’s the only moment of reprieve he can find, a case so complicated it’s scattered the entire agency into feverishly frantic sections. The sun has fully risen by the time he’s finished, and he’s chugging down some water when the song on the radio changes and he remembers, suddenly, for no real reason because the song had absolutely no association, sleeping against her back, so close the scent of her hair practically fell down his throat in that hotel bedroom in Paris.

This is the way it happens now; she’ll come to him violently, with no pre-warning. A memory, an image, that smell of hers, even the beads of sweat, and then he can hear her voice and see her face and she’s there glowing, maddeningly unreachable before him.

He needs to try very hard to keep everything he has just swallowed down, gripping to the seat and bracing his body for a full minute, waiting for it to pass because he’s going to be sick, just thinking about it, it still hasn’t gone away. How much it’s still a need and a want just: her. It’s been almost a year and a half since he had pressed himself to her body and forced himself to pry back; her belly soft to his, the insanity of leaving it making him dizzy as he walked backwards to the plane because he didn’t want to keep from looking at her.

And time changes absolutely nothing.

Tony wrenches open the car door and vomits all over the asphalt, the bright sun burning at his neck.

*

He hears from her for the first time in two very different ways; there’s a sealed and stamped envelope waiting in the letterbox of his apartment Monday morning and later that week, as he’s returning to the bullpen, he catches McGee looking unflinchingly doe-eyed at his monitor.

A picture is for McGee. A short letter that he reads so many times he thinks (knows) he could recite from memory is for him.

 

_Ahuvi,_

_I am okay. I am happy when I do not think of you and home though I feel both are still tied like a bell around my neck. There are 20 numbers on my list, do you remember? I have crossed many of them off and I’m feeling lighter._

_You are still there, waiting. I want you to know this.  At the top. At the bottom. A promise that I will see you again. Please believe that. My whole life, too, mon amour mon amour oh mon amour._

_Be good._

_Yada'_

 

The picture is harder to process and deal with, but not by much when he learns the meaning of the first and last Hebrew word and everything about this is like trying to juggle a knife between two fingers: an inevitability of being cut but not knowing where or how deep.

In the picture you can barely tell it’s her but there are enough distinctive features waiting there, for a person who knew where and how to look. Ziva is standing immersed in a garden, with short hair, almost to her chin and her skin tan and warm. The best part about it is also what is the most recognizable: her smile, small but brilliant. He only looks at it once, and it’s enough. It creates a chasm that hadn’t existed beforehand; the tangible proof to the life she is living. Gibbs doesn’t look at it at all, McGee keeps the jpeg file on his desktop and Abby prints off a copy and tucks it beneath folders and sheets in the bottom drawer of her desk.

He doesn’t tell anyone about the letter because the picture is painful enough of a message: I’m okay, it says, I’m still here, and I’ll still be here for a while longer.

He wanted her here. He wanted her home. He’s not selfish about her, he’s not and he wants her to be free and feel free and understand and come back stronger. But it creates this spark of resentment within him over their separation because he isn’t fine and he’s unhappy even when he isn’t thinking about her which is never, he is never not thinking about her.

“Ziva left, you have to face that!” Abby demands of him four weeks later when the giddiness has worn off and all that’s left is the fester of frustration and disappointment no one will directly acknowledge but is sticking between all of them.

_You_ , is all he hears. She left you.

When he can’t sleep that night, he goes over all of it in his head, those three words swimming to the surface – _my whole life_ \- meaning what exactly? Another year, two more months, a decade without one another and she would love him? He can’t accept it and yet he has no choice, he replays their farewell on a loop – he has faced it, over and over and over - what if he refused to leave her?

*

On Christmas Eve he sleeps with Zoe on a bed that feels far too big for two people. He likes Zoe, he does. She’s full of energy and was a magnetic, colorful distraction but when they’re finished and she’s asleep beside him he thinks it isn’t enough, not by a long shot.

The next morning, in a moment of weakness, he drives himself all the way to the airport because he’s finished with waiting. Ziva won’t relinquish herself from his very soul, she’s always present, he can’t let her go and he’s sick and sad and fed up with trying.

But he doesn’t even stop the car when he gets there and, he’s a pathetic mess, with tears and snot running down his face as he turns right back around.

Zoe is awake when he walks through the door; she’s wicked with a smile and takes him back to bed, and he thinks it’ll have to be okay. It will have to be.

*

It’s New Year’s Eve and the whole team decide to go out to a bar to celebrate, catching their killer and wrapping up their case right before the count down.

They make it just as fireworks are shooting off outside and confetti is spilling from the ceiling like rain shower inside.

There’s one part of the bar that isn’t occupied, an open booth in the corner and it’s absurd how they all manage to fit in there together, but they do. There’s an infectious energy in the building creating spontaneous frivolity, Abby and McGee practically giggle every time Ducky starts telling a story and even Gibbs stays for a beer.

One by one they all eventually peel off though, more drunk from lack of sleep than anything else, until it’s just Palmer and Tony sitting on either side of the table.

Tony cradles his whiskey, thinking of nothing in particular, it’s a pleasant release, when Palmer, a crease across his forehead, leans back, pushing away his third bottle of beer.

“I-I don’t get it, ya know?”

Tony turns his attention away from the television screen showing footage of Times Square to Jimmy who looks about ready to pass out, his cheeks flush and his glasses slipping down his nose. Having barely touched his own drink, Tony resigns himself to the fate of being the designated driver.

“What’s that, Peter Parker?”

Palmer flops both elbows against the table, tipping his head to one side.

“All--all this crap about being able to start over….ss-start new on a new year…there’s always a day between who you were yesterday and who you can be tomorrow.”

Tony, never really one for mixing alcohol and espousing philosophies together, thinks he’s too old and too tired for this conversation.

Just as he’s about to assemble a response that would get them both up and out of the place, Palmer looks him dead in the eye.

“Cuz you know…Z-Ziva did it and it wasn’t New Year’s - it was just a regular day in September.”

Tony, without moving, lets the rush of the inevitable happen and waits for it to pass. It’s the first time he’s heard anyone from the team talk openly about her - actually use her name - since the picture and that was months ago, and they hardly used it then, as though mutually agreeing on the unstable nature of it. It used to bother him, like a gnawing obsession; he didn’t have the energy to use it himself, so he would wait for someone, anyone, to unceremoniously bring her up instead. But no one ever did. It turned into a small comfort, knowing he didn’t need to carry himself against the possible onslaught of whatever might come right after it.

But sitting in that booth, across from Palmer, the earth doesn’t implode, the way he thinks it ought to as he hears it. The tremor is there, and he can feel that familiar ache, but he can also feel his fingers, can keep breathing; the sense of ease from before has not completely abandoned him.

Despite the minimal fallout though, there must be something lingering on Tony’s face, some indication of a taboo that has just been broken because Palmer is now gaping at him, his expression unbearably apologetic.

He abruptly rises from the table, hovering there for a moment or two, “S-sorry man, I’m sorry, let’s just…let’s go.”

Tony, as gently as he can do so without dispelling Palmer of his pride, guides them both outside and towards his car. He drops Palmer off, bringing him to the door and exchanges his shoulder for Breena’s.

With nowhere else to be and reluctant to return home to an empty apartment, Tony gets back into his car and heads towards the water. A couple of people are keeping the party going, shooting off crackers and other paraphernalia he knows should concern him, but he walks right past it to get to the railing of the pier. 

He stands there, thinking as he breathes in the cold air that is unforgivable in its inability to quieten his brain, of the changes he’s made between every single yesterday and every single tomorrow since they were last together. There are hundreds, hundreds of instances he can think of that have debilitated him but have also tightened his threshold. He can stand to think about her, to hear her name and carry on walking through every yesterday, for every tomorrow.

_I can change with you._

Without her, without that other life, that life he had been unknowingly grieving for, he is.

*

Any sense of this, this fortitude he may have pathetically believed he had turns to absolute shit the second his eyes land on Tali’s.

There’s a choke of it lining his throat, how insurmountable the desperation is, that he knows he will have to hold her at some point and cannot fathom how.

For hours, he doesn’t need to. There’s either someone taking her hand or a person close by who wants to meet her. Eventually, she’s placed into her stroller where she promptly falls asleep as everything he had constructed around and beneath himself for the past two or so years become such scraps of fabrication, like he had nothing to show for all the hard work of moving forward but empty, shaking hands he hides under the table.

“Go home.” Gibbs grunts out at him once the debriefing with Orli has finished. For all the team’s unflappable enthusiasm for her, Tony appreciates that someone and of course it’s Gibbs, of course it is, can’t look at Tali. He hasn’t so much as acknowledged her existence, as though needing to remain, and Tony understands this, in the illusion; to remain in that world where Ziva is still wandering within it.

Tali, somewhere between his car getting fitted with a child seat and her possessions and stroller being packed into the trunk, wakes from her nap. She blinks away sleep, searching, he can tell, for the face she knows to mean peace and instead finding his.

His brain is at the point of no longer being able to process any more information, barely comprehending what it means to walk with both feet. But once Tali is scooped up and pawned off to him, the only clarity that manages to filter through is that holding her requires both of his hands and that they stop shaking, almost immediately, once he is.

For hours, they’re lost together out in the universe, untethered but to each other. Eventually, when his resilience runs out and the walls don’t seem to be holding themselves upright – _Ziva kept this from you, his heart rips at nerves, thrashing out at anything close enough to seep the pain it holds to further, she’s gone and she kept this from you_ -  he gets scared, scared enough not to want to be alone with her. He invites Palmer over, then his father, who – and Tony never remembers feeling quite so emboldened by him - treats Tali as though he were there, eagerly awaiting her arrival, right outside the delivery room. 

Needing to take a break and get out of the confines of the house, Tony brings her in with him to visit with McGee. He can tell how much she likes McGee, warming to him

quicker than she has to others, as if sensing his earnestness, and the resemblance to her mother, Tony understands, is so much more than just her looks.

“I loved her, Tim.” He says and it’s the first time he’s ever said it out loud. To another human being. To himself. It should do something tangible, he thinks, make a crack in the ground, through the sky but it does nothing and the guilt gnaws at him all the more.  For only being half brave enough to say it now; for never being brave enough to say it to her then, out of the hundreds of opportunities when he could have, when he wanted to.

Tim, without any air of hesitation, turns his head to look at him and says, “I know you did” in such a soft and sure way; Tony can feel the dulling of his guilt, allowing it to resettle as something more helpful: possibility.  He might never have told Ziva, and Tali might not know him but he could at least try and tell Ziva now, in the way of getting to know their daughter.

But that night, Tali startles awake from what he can only guess was a bad dream. She cries out once for Ziva, a little, hopeful plea but when Ziva does not come for her, she begins to shift into panic, trying again, and then again, growing increasingly more unrestrained the longer Ima does not appear.

Tony bounces her, walks her in the stroller, thinks about strapping her into the car seat and going for a drive but he’s so punch-drunk tired the high likelihood of killing them both dismisses this idea. Instead, he carries her over to the couch, out of options, and she shrieks and wails away from him, coughing between her sobs they were so thick.

Almost in tears himself, Tony collapses beside her and pulls her over and against his chest, “I know, I know, Tali, Aba’s here, you’re not alone, Aba is here.” He hushes, patting her back, thinking of how lame a consolation prize those words were, but so worn-out, gradually, she settles. 

She finds his eyes in the dark and for some inextricable reason, that he can see tears half rolled on her cheeks erupts a sadness in him that hadn’t been there before. How unavoidable it was, Ziva’s absence, how infinite; he is crumbling against this insane reality they’re now supposed to just operate in.

As if sensing something, an intangible shift in their atmosphere, Tali reaches for his fingers, tugging them close to her face. Tony looks at her, this creature who had the ability to instil a type of power in him that he knew in that moment no other single person could, and thinks, for the first time since they’ve been together, _we’re going to be fine, you and I, we’re going to be fine_ : a humming veil he will cover them both in until it appears as skin.

*

The Paris picture had been taken by an Australian tourist; a spirited older woman who was walking by just as Tony was moving to help Ziva off from the scooter. She found this gesture, however innocuous, indicative of their love for one another and so assured she was, neither one of them had made much of an effort to correct her.

Noticing the camera hanging from Tony’s shoulder, she had asked if they wanted a picture.

Yesterday and this morning, Tony had pleaded with Ziva to take a picture with him, standing by different landmarks, by the hotel sign, for ‘ _posterity sake_.’ She had ignored each request, scoffed at the last one, muttering something under her breath that sounded eerily similar to, ‘ _good luck with that’_ so Tony expected he'd have to coax her into taking a picture with him now but she accepted the offer immediately, holding his hips in her hands as the rapid-fire click went off.

“Oh, very sweet.” The woman approved, looking at the viewfinder and then back up with a smile. “You’ve been together a while, I can tell. How long has it been? Celebrating an anniversary, I’ll bet.”

A deflecting answer, inane and superficial, is dancing loosely on his tongue to fight against the question drilling its way through his chest – what yet another stranger can see between them in a simple picture that neither are willing to – and he’s just about to speak when Ziva beats him to it.

“Not long enough.”

She gently tapped at his belly as she said it, the way she’s done a dozen or so times before, in the squad room, the elevator, and even though there’s not a hint of her usual sarcasm, it’s this gesture more than the tone of her voice, that makes him realize that she meant it.

The tourist clutched at her heart, taken by the answer and returned the camera, wishing them well.

It had caught him so off guard – they weren’t talking about what had happened last night, at least not explicitly - that he could hardly speak at all. Not as they packed, not as they returned the scooter and arranged the car for the pickup, not until they reached the consulate and he had no choice but to clear his throat, push it all aside, and get to work.

But as he’s staring at the picture now, the realization engulfs him, that he hadn’t said anything. That nothing happened between them after Paris, not for years.  

The more he stares, the wilder and more inconceivable it seems; whose job was it to say something, who could’ve made the decision that the chasm was unmeasurable but worth jumping over anyway? Where would they be now if he’d stopped then, if he’d just stopped and told her that this was it, she was it, that being with her - all her relentless might, the hint of fondness to her voice whenever she was making fun of him, the way her faced looked right after she laughed – was something he would never get enough of.

From the other room, there’s a loud, high-pitched squeal of Tali’s giggle and it startles him, the picture frame slips from his hand, hits the ground and breaks.

“Everything okay?” His father yells out, in-between the sounds he was imitating of a lion.

“It’s fine, dad, just don’t let her come in here, I broke some glass.” Tony bends down to assess the damage; although a clean break, the frame was shot. The picture would need an entirely new one.

What shards he can easily pick up, he dumps, the rest he sweeps and tosses, along with the wooden frame. He’s thinking about what to do with the picture, contemplating folding it up and storing it in his pocket. As he goes to bend it over, just to give his chest a break from having to look at her face for so long, something in the bottom corner catches his eye.

He freezes. His chest, his brain, everything just stops. It takes him a second, but he quickly turns it back around, examining their forms in the picture like they’ll reveal something he should know, some answer to a riddle he’s just been given and then turns it over again, expecting the number to no longer be there, a figment of his imagination but it’s there, clearer still.

_Number 1 and number 20_ , he reads, in a handwriting he has known for many years, having to read it almost as much as he had to look at his own.

Tali bounds into the room, coming straight for him and she is the gush of air he needed; he catches her before she can get any closer and lifts her right up and that giggle returns, perfectly pitched, perfectly golden.

_Not long enough_ , rings out, clear as a bell, aloud in his head.

*

As they’re flying across the ocean, towards Israeli, towards a trail Ziva has left for them to discover, he pens his final letter to her.

_Dear Ziva…_

He stops, a knot in his throat and turns his head, taking in their daughter sleeping, and suddenly every color of every tomorrow floods his brain, all the notes - pitched and warm and silly - of laughter echo around his skull. He looks at her and pictures the entire world he gets with her and tries again.

 

_Dear Ziva,_

_It’s been two days. I see your face as our daughter smiles, as she cries, as she’s falling asleep, trying hard to keep her eyes open, as if she’s certain I’ll disappear if she closes them. I think she’s looking for you too, in my face, although I think I have the better deal._

_Tali. I hope she loves to sing. I hope for her a good, long life. I hope that as she grows up and I give her all the wonderful answers to the questions she has about you that she trusts that you have never left her the same way I do._

_What a dream you have created. What a dream I’m holding. You were once my dream, Ziva but now there is Tali and that’s about the most unfair and terrific thing. I’ll tell her everything, I’ll tell her over and over, how much I love her, how much you do too. In Hebrew. In English. In Spanish. I’ll tell her._

_I love you. I love you, Ziva._

_Tony._

 

*

He digs up the list he had watched her bury in the ground years ago and finds not only the same feeling that turning over the Paris picture had given him, mirroring how it felt to turn over the palm of their daughter’s hand but coordinates too: a tiny, hopeful, constellation.


	2. Chapter 2

Ziva chants the same blessing each night, shutting her eyes and bowing her head.

The blessings are her way of counting, are a hope – a wire fixed to be going somewhere – for less days to come. For her _Haim Shelli_. Her little life. Who is now, finally, united with the one Ziva had to keep her from.

There are two objects that would unquestionably identify who she was, who she had been, should she be killed, and her possessions abandoned. A card so worn, the initial picture on the front has faded and a piece of cloth that could easily be misidentified as a scarf but was actually, should you look closer, a baby blanket.

Both remain on her person, somewhere, anywhere she can place them that appears unremarkable, that is discrete. Since she arrived into the village she’s currently hauled up in, she’s been keenly aware of two traces hunting for any indication of her, but she’s done extensive work on her current surroundings engulfing her into anonymity. She’s sure it won’t be long until both traces give up.

For now, she was safe.

Ziva finishes the blessing, doesn’t bother reopening her eyes and folds into herself against the single mattress in the corner, undoing her makeshift belt – that blanket -and unfolding the card from where it was tucked underneath the waistband of her pants, holding them both to her nose. Her blessings, though a makeshift tally, don’t contain an exact number for a reason. Every second of every waking day, for every hour at night that she cannot sleep, she is aware of the number. It soils itself against her, brutal in its defiance to be seen, to be recognized. _This_ long, it has been, it has been _this_ long since you have seen her in this life.

Ziva prevents this from spiralling, from gaining momentum and from getting any further out of control than it already has by breathing in and thinking about the picture, thinking about who is with her, of how they appear together.

_My life. My soul. My eyes. My love._

Ziva repeats the words from the blessing, needing a little more tonight, needing extra compression against the wound that leaks, against this insidious sorrow. She forces the words out of her mouth, to keep from screaming and doesn’t think of Tali within them - not of her tiny hands pulling flowers, not of her tiny hands reaching to hold Ziva’s- but she does so, oh she does so completely.

*

The co-ordinates turned themselves into an apartment in a mostly residual district in Paris.

The apartment is full of sunlight and furniture. Full of objects that held a promise. For days, he and Tali move in a trance, slowly working at getting a rhythm. At first, she won’t go to sleep if he’s not in the room with her and then, as if a routine, they switch, and he becomes the one who can’t close his eyes unless she’s close.

Between getting acquainted, learning the quickest ways and all the different voices he could use to convince Tali to let him help her brush her teeth, he tries not to wonder, tries not to let his brain create endless scenarios of where Ziva is, if Ziva is. The coordinates hadn’t offered much other than some sort of message he’s now working his way through. A message detailing a life she had set up for the two of them but not a life - and he must stare at Tali’s sleeping body to keep from seeing blood and shrapnel lodged into skin - that would necessarily include her.

The dreams he kept having of her were ceaseless, almost suffocating in their vivid depiction. He’s crawling through the forests of the earth, as though looking for something so elusive it was bound to slip past him until she emerges, at one point or another, reaching to lift him up, reaching to hold him.

He wakes every single time with her arms gone and the loss of her trapped in his throat but every single time, he also finds Tali beside him and he can breathe again.

This is his life, this is all he needs he tries hard to convince himself but it’s there all the same, lining the walls, the furniture she picked, she traces herself between doorways and the Hebrew children’s books on the shelves, the promise of Ziva. 

*

It’s close to dawn when she enters the city.

She’s been awake and moving for no less than 48 hours; there is a persistent, acid throbbing in her stomach. For all the distance she’s travelled, miles and miles over the earth, across the peaks of mountains, this space between them now seems insurmountable.

When the motorcycle she had stolen runs out of gas, she dumps it and forces herself to walk the rest of the way, and not run, knowing it’d only slow her down when her adrenaline gave out. But when the apartment finally comes into view, her body knows nothing of conscious, rational thought, and she flies through the narrow streets and up the path.

It does not surprise her to find them together.

First, she goes to Tali.

Ziva brings her face up against that of her daughters and breathes in.

“Oh, haim shelli, oh, neshama shelli, forgive me.”

It takes some time to be able to lift away but eventually, she kisses Tali’s cheek, carefully picking her up and carrying her down the hall and into the nursery.

The light from the sun is now pitching its way through the cracks of the curtains and Ziva draws them firmly together, knowing she didn’t have long. She kisses Tali’s cheeks again, holding the image of her sleeping, safe and peaceful up against the thinnest parts of her heart before turning around to go and find him.

“I’m dreaming.” He announces, the words muffled in his throat, still caught by sleep. Ziva watches, sitting against the curve of his body on the edge of the bed as he begins to turn her over in his mind, his eyes searching her face.

“No, my love,” Ziva says quietly, reaching forward to graze his cheek, planting them both in this reality before things can fall any further off the surface. “Not this time.”

She smiles at him and she waits.

It takes him a minute but Tony, as if functioning out of nothing more than pure instinct, suddenly reaches out and grips onto her forearms and she has to balance her hands against his chest to not fall right on top of him.

“Are…are you sure…” He starts, his voice already losing the grit of sleep, now, instead, humming with anticipation; he feels electric, like anything he touches will ignite. “Because usually this is the part where you leave, Ziva and I can’t keep having this dream, you can’t keep leaving.”

“ _Tony_ ,” She bites forcefully, holding her eyes firmly on his. “Look at me.”

He does and then clutches to her much tighter, shifting himself back against the headboard, drawing her against him.

“Ziva?” He repeats softly and hearing her name in that way, from somewhere deep in his body, is like warm syrup being poured down her throat; she immediately wants him to say it again.

“Yes,” She answers breathlessly.

“Ziva?” His voice trembles over a smile, his fingers dancing their way up her chin, his thumb reaching her bottom lip.

She brings her forehead to meet his. “When I said I would never leave you…”

Tony laughs then, a little haphazardly, it gets caught in his chest and he gently pulls back her head.

“Yeah…” He says, his eyes full of tears, and she presses her lips to the palm of his hand cupping her cheek, “I’m looking right at you, kid.”

Slowly, they turn over, and he shifts her beneath him as they begin to take stock of what time has deprived them of from one another’s bodies. He starts carefully, there’s a hint of precision to how and where he places his hands and Ziva knows what he is doing. That he is searching her for injury, for any trauma she won’t reveal to him and although he won’t find any, she lets him take his time, let’s him do this for once.

The goosebumps rise over her arms, down her neck when he turns from careful to desperate, now using his mouth to trace and brush against her. When he starts to kiss her ankle, tugging up one of the legs of her pants, her breath audibly catches in her throat and she feels him lift away, finding his eyes waiting for her when she props up on her elbows and looks down at him.

“If this is really a dream and I wake up and you’re gone… I’m serious, Ziva, I’m going to have to throw myself off that balcony.”

She rolls her eyes. “I can pinch you if you would like, Tony. Do I ever do that in your dreams?”

Tony and his face is effervescent, the brightest light she’s ever seen, smiles widely, “Could you please darling, just a small one?”

Before she can even begin to think of trying, he puts his mouth back down to the ground of her body and all she could’ve ever thought to say, to think, to imagine, goes in the instant he kisses her there. He finds what skin that isn’t covered by clothing and kisses it slowly, a languished man at a well until he’s skimming just against the surface of her belly.

“Please don’t leave, Ziva.”

“Tony.”

“Please.” He breaks.

Ziva reaches down, taking one of his hand’s and putting it right over her breast, the spot where her heart is rapid; I am real, that heartbeat declares, I am here, that heartbeat sings beneath his fingers.

A sharp cry echoes out through the hallway and into their bedroom, breaking their reverie. They both respond to it in almost the exact same way, an innate alertness to their bodies but Ziva reaches the ground first.

“I will be right back.”

Tony tries to remain calm, not to count the seconds, but his heart is a painful, threatening thing. Before he’s even aware of it, he’s halfway off the bed when Ziva reappears in the doorway, a blurry eyed Tali blinking at him from her arms.

“Well hi there, sleepy head.” He smiles as she scrunches her face then buries herself against Ziva’s shoulder and for a moment, Tony wonders if for all those nights he’s been having those dreams, she’s been sleeping beside him, having her own.

Ziva lays Tali down in the middle of the bed and without speaking, they go to either side of her, curling inwards so she is cocooned. It doesn’t take long for her to fall back to sleep but she keeps one hand touching Ziva and the other touching Tony, as if already sensing the restoration of her equilibrium.

“You planned to tell me?” Tony asks and there’s a dozen different ways to interpret this question, he’s not really sure which answer he needs the most, but as he watches Ziva’s eyes longingly take in the rise and fall of Tali’s back, it’s clearer than anything else, which one he needs the most.

“Yes.” She admits quietly, “When things were safe. When things were…” But she can’t finish the sentence and he’s grateful because it might mean scaling a precipice without the rope, a sure plummet to the earth.

“I know that it does not make up for the number of lost days.”

“Years.” He interjects and it’s a bitter word in his head, even crueler out loud and he can see it fall across her face, what it does to her, and instantly regrets it.

It’s still only for a moment. Ziva slowly reaches over, taking his wrist in her hand and he lets her unfold him. Let’s the frayed edges of his hurt forget themselves from the sheer contact of her fingers slipping between his; they stick and conjoin skin to skin.

“She knew my name,” He ventures, and he has brought their hands to rest on his chest, Ziva’s arm now covering Tali’s body like a harness.

“When she first looked at me, she didn’t seem afraid at all.”

Ziva has closed her eyes, but he watches as a tear slips out of one of them and kisses the ridges of her knuckles.

“I showed Tali that picture, every morning and every night. It was the first thing we looked at when she woke up, before she fell asleep. There was not enough…I did not know when she would be able to see you but I…you were still there, in the in-between, Tony. Always, you were there for her.”

He struggles to clear his throat, turning his head and his eyes upward to keep from crying.

“And you?” He finally manages, the brittleness of their reality beginning to filter through, it was no longer avoidable. They aren’t Rick and Ilsa on the tarmac but two people lying beside their daughter, a daughter she was forced to keep from him out of fear, out of a danger that has not dissipated; a danger that requires enduring further separation.

“Was I still there for you?”

You were always the brave one, she wants to say to him, you were the one with open hands,  fighting for us to stay on a path –  _I just want you to come home, with me_   – with the assured belief that we could stop making one another blind by choice.

But she doesn’t say any of this.

“Mon amour mon amour oh mon amour.” She whispers and it’s no use, he’s crying openly now. He wants to hide his face but he’s still holding her hand and for all the world, he wouldn’t let it go, so she sees it all.

Be brave, she thinks, be brave.

“My whole life, I will love you. For my whole life I get to.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The two Hebrew words from Ziva’s letter which I’m positive I got wrong are:
> 
> Ashuvi/my love and Yada/to know
> 
> Ziva couldn’t risk identifying Tony or herself in the letter (or in the picture, which is why she’s so hard to make out), but had to express how much he still meant to her, ergo he’s her love, and knows her, better than anyone. 
> 
> In saying that, I completely understand if you don’t buy Ziva keeping Tali from Tony in this story, I didn’t explicitly give the reason for why, more implied it coming from knowing she was being hunted and feared Tony becoming a target, but if you don’t buy that, I get it. The canon of it will forever be a point of contention for me – as it is for many of us, I’m sure – and I just wasn’t creative enough to find a proper solution so I sorta half assed it here. 
> 
> A big thanks for reading, you can find me over on tumblr @ ribbonthief or zivacaps if you ever wanna chat about Ziva/Tiva (and now apparently densi too, oy)!


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